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80 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
poems, and they saw no reason why they should endure further
insolence from Ezra. They read aloud their immortal lines, and
found that their depth of perception was surprisingly similar.
Fletcher tells us, in Life Is My Song, that he was amazed when
Amy Lowell declaimed,
The loud pink of bursting hydrangeas
and he immediately responded with his own
In the green gardens of my soul
The crimson peonies explode. 14
Amidst coronae of gaily-bursting flowers, Amy Lowell and Fletcher
sat down to plot the overthrow of the literary dictator and upstart,
Pound. Fletcher complained that Pound had loudly disapproved
of the exploding peonies, and Amy Lowell replied that
he had been unable to appreciate her volatile blooms. A blow
for freedom would have to be struck. The most readily available
weapon was money. Fletcher suggested that Amy Lowell offer to
contribute a large sum of money to The Egoist, with the stipulation
that Miss Weaver get rid of Pound, but his mode of attack
was too direct.
Fletcher was a person of unstable loyalties, and he mentions
his "own peculiar bad temper." A prey to increasing depression,
he finally drowned himself in a little pond in Arkansas. His alliance
with Amy Lowell, like most of his relationships, was shortlived.
He later wrote,
"Had I been wise enough with that wisdom which comes only
to the intellectually mature, I would have seen in Miss Lowell's
fresh arrival in England the opening attack in a carefully-planned
and long-sustained literary campaign; a campaign, in fact, which
only ended on the day of her death, and which, I am convinced,
she enormously enjoyed. . . . Between the time of her first trip
in 1913 and her second she had become transformed from the
obscure amateur of 'A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass' (an early
book of her poems) to the professional leader of the new poets.
. . . From one included in the first Imagist anthology only for